I suppose people hadn’t really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s – progressive and an atheist. Edmund White Read Quote
In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the ‘Feminine Mystique.’ Edmund White Read Quote
I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening – the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us – seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent. Edmund White Read Quote
The Truth About Lorin Jones’ will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism – of its manners, if not its politics. Edmund White Read Quote
Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction. Edmund White Read Quote
Few writers in history have ever been ‘politically correct’ (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there’s no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos. Edmund White Read Quote
In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. Edmund White Read Quote
In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative – of a moment in history, a social class… for instance, I wanted to make the boy in ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me. Edmund White Read Quote
Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. Edmund White Read Quote
